The 19th National sports festival has come and gone but there are some things that need to be addressed for future purposes. The most important of them all is the criteria used in selecting individual winners. There were two suggestions by www.nigerianchess.com before the tournament, which were:

Using Performance rating instead of the usual Percentage performance

Removing the Idea of reserves (this means all 6players play on 6boards as a team)

Most of the top players in the country agreed to any of these aforementioned format but many coaches do not. This is due to their personal reasons, and on top of the list is, the possibility of coming to the National Sports Festival and not winning any medal. The opportunity in exploiting the flaws in percentage performance helps mostly bringing out average or mediocre players in winning medals. There was a rumour that an athlete won a medal without moving a pawn. The chances of that would be totally reduced if performance rating was used.

In a recent article of ours (http://www.nigerianchess.com/index.php/national-sports-festival-reports-gist-part-1), we have already cited why Nigerian Chess Federation keeps giving the same excuse they have been giving for the past four (4) editions of the National Sports Festival. Nigerian chess community is happy for the fact that for the first time in history, National Sport Festival Chess Team event is going to be rated. Though rating the event was not very much acceptable by some coaches but totally acceptable by the players. A state coach (name withheld) told us directly that in the next National Sports Festival, chess event should not be rated because to him, it is hindering some flexibility.

Note that using rating performance will only reduce the rate of colluding but not totally eradicate as rich coaches can still try to buy a full game point from an established player who knows he or she has zero chances of bagging a silverware at a later part of the rounds. The good news is every player can calculate his or her performance rating round by round. The Chief Arbiter when printing each round pairings can also print players performance rating for each round and cumulative rounds as well.

We took a complete time out to compile what the list of winners would be in the male category if they had used Performance rating as against the Percentage performance criteria used in the tournament. We couldn’t produce that of female category based on the sole reason that their full tournament report was not updated on chess-results server.

From board 1 to 4, the minimum number of games used for the tiebreak was 5games (this simply means players that played only 4games would not be eligible for medals) while the reserves were given a minimum number of 4games to be eligible. Forfeits and byes were counted as a clear point. As you can see below, it is not as scary as it seems, as a matter of fact, there were little changes to all the winners.

DISCLAIMER

This report is not prepared in any way to discredit the approved winners of this tournament but to show what the result would look like if the most scared criterion (rating performance) of selecting winners is used.

Seeing the list above, we urge the Nigerian chess players to drop a comment, telling us which would be their most preferred criterion in the next National Sports Festival. Percentage Performance or Rating Performance?

Boss. We should take a cue from our sister game Scrabble where players play according to their category. A chess player now playing Scrabble won a bronze medal. In the opens section of Scrabble event. Do u think if all play all like u all r suggesting he would have won that. With the likes of Wellington, Moses Peter’s n nsikak playing. But bcus they r masters players they can’t play with him. U have a state with 6 players all on 2200 n above. How do u think the smaller states have any chance. If u wanna root out dealing n corruption we must give all states a level playing field

Boss. We should take a cue from our sister game Scrabble where players play according to their category. A chess player now playing Scrabble won a bronze medal. In the opens section of Scrabble event. Do u think if all play all like u all r suggesting he would have won that. With the likes of Wellington, Moses Peter's n nsikak playing. But bcus they r masters players they can't play with him. U have a state with 6 players all on 2200 n above. How do u think the smaller states have any chance. If u wanna root out dealing n corruption we must give all states a level playing field